Though it is easy to criticise sites that are somewhat lacking in design smarts, not enough attention is paid to the opposite problem – overdesign.
Though it may seem logical to highlight important information on your site, overdo it and you could put off your users. If they see a panel which tries a little too hard to grab your attention, they could assume it’s an advert and ignore it completely.
This is illustrated beautifully by Jakob Neilsen, who uses the US Census Bureau website as an example to show how easily this can happen. Although the site has the US population in large red letters, when users were asked to find it, 86% would miss it entirely, assuming it was an advert.
Another example to illustrate the overdesign problem is the website of Boots the Chemist:
The site’s main content is made up of variously coloured, attention grabbing panels, which are likely to be ignored by the user. The large numbers in bright red font also add to the problem. (more…)